Robert J. Allen, David Garlan, and James Ivers

An increasingly important trend in the engineering of complex
systems is the design of component integration standards. Such
standards define rules of interaction and shared communication
infrastructure that permit composition of systems out of
independently-developed parts. A problem with these standards is
that it is often difficult to understand exactly what they
require and provide, and to analyze them in order to understand
their deeper properties. In this paper we use our experience in
modeling the High Level Architecture (HLA) for Distributed
Simulation to show how one can capture the structured protocol
inherent in an integration standard as a formal architectural
model that can be analyzed to detect anomalies, race conditions,
and deadlocks.